CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

In which things seem to be going wrong for a change

 

It just so happened that my old friend Judas had finally turned up, by way of a surprise telephone call, from Santa Cruz, California, where he claimed to be a vice-president of a non-profit organization that provided homes for people, and I was invited to join him there at any time, and he assured me that in no time at all, I could become a vice-president too.  But I had a songwriting career to attend to in Los Angeles—and the Primal Institute was down there too—so I figured I’d just hang out with Judas for a week on my way down south.

Having over a hundred dollars in my pocket—all I had left from the job I should have charged $3000 for—made me feel like a major success in business, so I “quit” smoking cigarettes and entertained myself on the long bus trip on January 2, 1978, by bitching about others’ cigarette smoke like I was some sort of completed being.  I had written Judas to warn him that I had decided not to smoke pot or cigarettes.  Since me and the mellow hippie chick in the seat next to mine were both going to Santa Cruz and it was a long ride, I had one hell of a stiffie the whole time as I told Betsy my entire life story, hoping it would make her fall in love with me.  I realized too late—like years later—like just now—that this was supposed to be a summer camp seduction, but I didn’t know the rules, and I know that Becky did, because she started a snowball fight with two teenage boys at a rest stop somewhere, and I could hear the cogs turning in her brain as she weighed her options with me: to make me come after her like I wanted her to, and be stuck in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t know the rules and may not be ready to learn them; or to keep playing the casual, ephemeral California Girl as her contribution to the summer camp seduction, in case I should catch on and suddenly become willing and able to do my part.

The best I could do in response to the instantaneously-generated infatuation that rose up inside me when she got tired and lay her head on my shoulder, was to lay my head on her head and pretend to sleep for many euphoric but frustrating hours, trying to figure out what I should do with this frizzy-haired marvel who I had in my clutches—or did I?  Since no one had educated me in these matters, and I was no longer a stupid teenager ready to grab first and take my chances, all I could do was intellectualize about what I should do, when and how I should do it.  Like it was a job interview, not a budding friendship and/or seduction.  When that perfect woman put her arms around me and kissed me good-bye in Santa Cruz as she prepared to board the city bus back to her old neighborhood, and volunteered her phone number, I realized my lapse in not kissing her myself two days ago, and I honestly didn’t know what to do.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I somehow knew I had 24 hours to call her if I wanted to be her boyfriend, because she’d just returned to her beloved coast after a stifling year with her family in Ohio, and she was excited, and Santa Cruz was full of guys who were ready to play.  If I wanted her to be my close confidante as she had so smoothly become when she was my captive audience on the bus, I had a week to call her.  If I wanted to be her casual friend, I had two weeks to call her, and after all these deadlines had past, I happened to see her in town and she asked me why I hadn’t called her.  She sounded mildly bewildered, and I could sense her wondering what was wrong with me as she walked away, once again suggesting I call her, but I noticed a change in the way she said the words, and I figured now that I’d gotten us both befuddled, it was hopeless, so I gradually put up a wall around the whole concept of being in love, and from then on it just hurt to fall in love, because I never looked Betsy Richards in the eyes and told her I liked her, just to see what she would do, and I haven’t been the same since.  It’s not fair that being young and being stupid had to happen to me at the same time; now that I would know what to say to any young chick who should voluntarily sit next to me listening to me blab about myself for 36 hours, I’m supposed to stay away from young chicks.  Isn’t that backwards?

I got a map of the area and found my way to the “Freedom House,” a large house on 33 acres in the strip of wooded hills south of Aptos, between Santa Cruz and Watsonville, one of the several houses in the area rented by Judas’s new benefactor: the Rivendell Family, or as it later came to be known, Rivendell Community Support Services, Inc.  Isn’t that a coincidence: Rivendell again.  Or as Tolkien put it, “Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, sadness.”

It was a gray rainy day, the first or second in a long series of rainy days at the end of a drought.  I got out of the city bus and slogged through the big muddy driveway full of rusty little cars and up to an enclosed porch which I could see was full of people.  I instantly knew by the way they were dressed and by the absence of old fuddy-duddies that I was not in Kansas anymore.  Although I was terrified, I was determined to not stand out in the rain and act stupid, so I confidently flung open the screen door and stepped in, and the young woman I saw first beamed at me and welcomed me to Rivendell; her name was Debbie Szcxhtain.  Then a black man with short hair and short beard and eyes like two arrows said, First things first: turn around and go back in through the other door, so you don’t track mud in this way.

I was suddenly beyond terrified: I had already withered up.  My welcome committee had consisted of the two things I feared most: “open friendliness comprising an invitation to participate” and “public rebuke as a manner of greeting.”

The man who had corrected me before I could set my back foot in the door turned out to be the primary founder of Rivendell, Tony Hill, who had a Masters Degree in Social Work.  His two co-conspirators were Maureen McDonald, a Psychiatric Nurse, and Freddie Venegas, Tony’s best friend; all three were from New York City; both men were reformed junkies and the nurse  was a reformed pill popper.  Others in the Family of Friends turned out to be ex-junkies, alcoholics, terminal cancer patients, lost boys like me, etc.  There was no mention of 12 Steps; nearly everyone in Rivendell was a marijuana smoker, if not confirmed pothead.  Maureen had gotten to the West Coast by being kidnapped and hauled out west with her arms and legs tied together by close friends, and thus rescued from her pill-thieving career in New York City.  She created Rivendell with Tony and Freddie.  Tony, the oldest of us all at age 33, had been a professional pool shark in New York City, complete with a manager and a suite of apartments.  Freddie and Tony used to fight over the same girls and steal Methadone from each other.  I found it fascinating—somewhat later when I got used to them—to see such intelligent people with such interesting backgrounds walking through their community with their heads held up high, providing homes for bad boys and girls and nutcases who would otherwise be incarcerated; even the Forebodingly Famous Ram Dass, yogified cohort of the infamous Dr. Timothy Leary, was on Rivendell’s Board of Directors.  Tony Hill believed there was a different way for society to teach its families and deal with its problems, and it had something to do with people living and working together on common goals like Rivendell was doing.  I couldn’t help but notice that Tony was not only not afraid of hurting my feelings, he was downright confrontive; despite my oft-reiterated pronouncements that Tony was trying to control my life, he and a few of his closest cronies in the Family were seldom seen at the Freedom House where Judas and I lived; we had meetings and lived together like close siblings, and we didn’t knock before entering any of our eight houses, no matter which one we happened to live in.

This was not an institution; it was a real family where our charges, the juvenile delinquents and nutcases, could become actual family members once they did their time—which they did with us—if they had been with us long enough and if they could get voted in.  We had meetings about business and meetings about behavior, feelings, rules, expectations, etc.  Nobody was forbidden to smoke pot, and until I came along nobody worried too much about acid.  The teenagers mostly smoked cigarettes, and if they wanted to smoke pot they had to get their own and keep it away from us, and nobody was allowed to sell it.  The Freedom House was an intake area; some of the other houses were set aside for specialty cases.  There were over 20 people living at Freedom, including young rapists, murderers, PCP burn-outs, burglars and robbers and then us Family members, like Judas and I and others; the key family members were mostly ghetto kids who had known each other back in New York City.  This was the most frightening experience I’d had since the first day of kindergarten. 

What terrified me about Freedom, from the first moment I set foot on it, was that a group of young dreamers was doing what it wanted, unsupervised, and they didn’t feel funny about it: they were neither rebellious not apologetic, had no interest in hiding their feelings, and I could read in their faces, their voices, their phrasing, intonation and vocabulary of cocky self-confidence, an unbridled excess of talent and energy in the area of life you might call “being awake.”  Most were smoking marijuana almost daily, but I could barely notice its effects on them maybe because of their vast experience with stronger stuff, and besides that, most of them weren’t stifled at the core, like me, and for some reason the marijuana didn’t seem to have an amotivational effect on anyone except for me and a few other ultra-sensitive, overly introspective people like me: we who would sit and think about our problems when smoking pot because it’s easy entertainment like TV and it fits the narcissistic tendencies of our personalities to sit around and interiorize the universe.  Me, I ran to Judas’s room and hid.  On my first evening at Freedom I heard a loud scuffle, and went out in the hall to see a large black kid being restrained and lightly pummeled by a pile of his peers for being an antisocial creep, a danger to everyone else’s good down-home feelings.  I peeked around the corner to find five or six kids pushing the other kid up against the wall, and Judas looked like he was ready to rip the guy’s head off if he didn’t stop resisting arrest, or whatever this was.

I went back into Judas’s bedroom and hid there for two weeks, eating the carob drops out of his trail mix, going out with him when we could get a ride to the beach, or out to his friend Woody’s secret shack in the woods, but mostly smoking cigarettes and writing in my journal.  Though I never again saw any violence at Rivendell, I was nearly paralyzed around all these aggressive, outspoken people.

I was particularly frightened of two women who just so happened to be my age, both Irish from the City, and both scarved and skirted from the neck to the floor, never far from the latest Feminist book they were reading to keep them stirred up.  These two outspoken young babes who refused to smile if there were any testicles in the room scared me so bad I literally wouldn’t come out of the room if Ellen or Ann Marie were on duty at the house; I was sure Ann Marie would put a mop in my hand, and I figured Ellen would just give me the evil eye or a tongue-lashing for not knowing the rules.  A few months later, Ellen was happily pregnant and didn’t resemble the scarved avenger at all, and Ann Marie was bouncing around in a halter top, but I vowed from the moment I set foot in that place to get the hell out of it as soon as possible, and I meant it.  I was beside myself with culture shock, truly aghast.  This was nothing like moving to Oregon with my Daddy, or getting an apartment with some high school buddy in Kansas.

Somehow the $120 I had left Hazing with hadn’t quite gotten me to Hollywood, so I faced the fact that I had landed without resources in a paradise of freaks, and I certainly didn’t want to get used to it, so I jumped on the city bus the very first morning, and went to the nearest town, Watsonville, and immediately procured a full-time job as a shop technician in a piano repair shop, for $3.00 an hour.  I continued to stay in Judas’s room for the first two weeks that I worked at Earl’s shop, saving my money till I could get my own room in Watsonville at the Stag Hotel for Men, where I was happily not allowed to have visitors.  I rode the bus to work every morning, came home and cooked myself dinner every evening, reread books on Primal Therapy, wrote in my journal, smoked cigarettes, got depressed, had no interest in marijuana or seeing anybody including Judas, and saved enough money to get my own house, a tiny one-bedroom cottage.

This was it: my Primal Therapy kingdom.  Every night I dragged my foam pad and sleeping bag—the only furniture I had—into the long bedroom closet where I would lay down and try to conjure up repressed emotions.  I got into it a ways, but there seemed to be a wall between me and the kind of results the books talked about.  I thought that was because I couldn’t give up cigarettes.  It took weeks to even get into the closet in the first place, because the prescription for starting Primal therapy was to stop all your bad habits at the same time, but I couldn’t get past step one with the dropping of defense mechanisms, especially smoking.  I did a little screaming and thrashing around in the closet over mediocre events the best I could remember, and I’m sure it made me a better person, more apt to vocalize, especially—it led to an insight that I was suspicious of people when they were kind to me—but it didn’t bring back memories of repressed trauma, it didn’t make me remember Grandma Wrathburn or those rides in the country with my Daddy at night, or being locked in my crib all day.  At that time in Watsonville, I felt mostly lonely and bored with myself, and to escape, I eventually devised a proposal to Rivendell, asking if I could some back since I had realized that  I wanted to be around people.  I called and found out when their next business meeting was going to be.

I attended the weekly meeting of Rivendell’s decision-making body, held at the conference room in the public library, and sat through Maureen’s browbeating of her staff, something along the lines of, It’s a chess game, folks!  Every move is critical!  You snooze, you lose!

That kind of thing.  When are we going to pay the rent on the Freedom House, etc.  How much food can we afford to buy?  Maxwell?  You had yourself down as an agenda item?

I read my proposal to join the Rivendell family officially, and before I had a chance to look around the room, Tony had his hand raised in the air.  Yes? I asked, thinking he had a question.  Yes! he agreed.  I vote yes!

Then everyone went around the circle, and they all raised up their hands one at a time and said they wanted me to be in their family, and let me assure you, my friends, that was one of the happiest moments of my life, and anything that these buddies of mine from their big City might have done from time to time that I disagreed with, nothing they did could ever have taken the basic wonderfulness away from what they did at the moment that they took me into their home as brazenly as they later criticized me openly to my face, and made me feel like I belonged to an honest unit of human beings for the first time in my life.

And there was my little family of co-workers at my job: owners of the piano store, Earl the grand master piano technician, the Santa Cruz area’s “concert tuner,” that is, the best-trained, smartest, hardest working, fastest, and most expensive piano technician in the area, and his business partner, Marshall, who was a retired Air Force captain.  Those two worked the store and the field, and we had a separate workshop in the same shopping center—which Marshall owned—where we reconstituted old upright pianos, player pianos, and pump organs, which worked on air like player pianos.  Earl was extremely picky, so fortunately he had appointed John his shop foreman, and Earl stayed out of our way most of the time.  What made the job easy was that John was a mellow bass player, a jazz musician, not a piano tuner, so he could tell me what Earl didn’t like about my work and I almost enjoyed it, because I liked drama and I liked personal attention, and I liked knowing I’d gone to school and my supervisor hadn’t.  It was fun to learn that way, compared to being alone on my knees in my Mama’s garage in the dead of winter with a broken part that is 150 years old and nobody to tell my problems to.  It wasn’t so bad, now that it was just a job, and my time was covered, every hour of it, and player pianos were almost out of the picture, but one thing was wrong.

It was the clock.  It was seldom more than 15 feet away from my eyeballs, and my eyeballs were seldom more than 15 seconds away from it.  My preoccupation with the approach of 5:00 p.m. ruined my relationship with the clock.  I didn’t even realize it, until an insight I had, which had been inspired by a Primal Therapy session, when I realized that the clock was a tool, not a toy; if you spend too much time gazing upon its face, you become a prisoner to it, and you spiral downward into what physicists call the “molasses zone,” where time doesn’t seem to move at all, and it requires a concentrated effort to use even the smallest of your own muscles.  That part I could handle; what I didn’t like was that once my complete attention was focused on keeping a running mental tabulation of how many 15-minute units were still standing between me and going-home time, it became naturally impossible to enjoy any facet of my existence, either before or after 5:00.  After I realized what clock-watching was doing to my already strained motivational system, I forced myself to pull my eyes away, which gave me half a chance of having the least horrible experience possible, considering that I was working on pianos.  Fortunately, the third and final technician in the shop wasn’t a piano tuner either; he was a diesel mechanic, so I actually had a secret agreement with myself that I was the superior employee.  Fortunately my fantasy didn’t come with any superior responsibilities.

And I couldn’t really handle any more responsibility than going to work full-time, because for all the time I spent working, I had nothing to do in my spare time if it cost money, because my room and board at Rivendell was my entire paycheck.  Stipends were distributed equally to everybody, depending on what was left over after the bills were paid; I usually got $7.50 a week, which was what was left of my official $15 stipend after Rivendell’s accounting office got through borrowing half of it.  I was not being taxed; I was being brought in out of a big world that I never had to look at anymore.  I was not in Santa Cruz County anymore; Rivendell hovered 6 inches above the Earth.  It was a self-contained unit, perfect for someone like me who knew nothing about making friends.

Nevertheless, despite the smoothness of re-entry and a fairly soft landing, I brought my own turbulence with me.  There were small children at Rivendell and as an authority on Primal Theory, and an advocate of natural childbirth and democratic, permissive schooling, I couldn’t tolerate the way the Rivvies spoke to their children.  They weren’t polite enough.  They didn’t act guilty when their children cried.  I flew into a rage at the child’s caretaker every time any child started crying.  Maybe I was raw from screaming in the closet.  Undoubtedly, I had stimulated at least some nominal activity in the repressed emotions department; maybe something had broken loose and was lurking just beneath the conscious level, making me act it out frantically, looking for trouble, like a walking time bomb.  I generally adopted a superior attitude and skated along as Judas’s shadow.  We got teased a little for never being apart, but it didn’t matter.  When there are 60 people in your family instead of 6, you are 10 times less susceptible to feeling hated, because if—for example—there were two family members making fun of you, that’s a third of your nuclear family, but at Rivendell that would have been only a thirtieth of the extended family making fun of me at any given time.

Since the first time I’d been at Rivendell, while I was living in Watsonville by myself, a new brother had moved in from the City.  Bobby Furlani was someone’s best old friend, like most of us including me, a young Italian from the neighborhood back in the City, who had just begun a Methadone program before migrating to Rivendell, hoping this so-called Family of Friends that someone he knew had fallen into could help serve in his successful escape from heroin addiction.  He was a little tall and very thin, and at this time my only impression of him was as a shadow crossing the hallway.  I thought I detected him wondering where he was.

There was a young man by the name of John Stoats who had been with Rivendell so long that he was practically their mascot.  He had been a teenage bodybuilder and PCP smoker when his parents took him for a ride one day while he was overdosing on Angel Dust, PCP, or elephant tranquilizer, whatever you want to call it, and never came back to get him.  The state institution where he’d gotten dumped out was where Maureen was working at the time—this was before Rivendell became self-supporting, and the Founders were working actual jobs to support the birth of their dreams.  Maureen found a way to bring John Stoats home with her, and he became proto-Rivendell’s first placement.  John was a big soft teddy bear, his big hard muscles gone to flab and his brain gone to heaven—or had it?

I wasn’t convinced.  I liked talking to John, because he had the awesome gift of being able to speak in word salad: he could ramble non-meaningful phrases of unconnected words better than he could converse normally—and I either wanted to get him interested in Primal Therapy so I could cure him, and impress everybody else, or figure out how to do to myself what John had done to himself, without having to do anything embarrassing or scary to accomplish it.  Then they’d have to put me on disability.

I wasn’t the only one who liked to listen to John mumbling and giggling about whatever his concerns were that day.  One afternoon, John appeared from the mountain, where he had been asleep in his tent for 3-1/2 days.  He was disoriented, standing around in the living room and pacing back and forth, arguing with himself, when a man I’d never seen came out of one of the bedrooms, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and when John saw him he lit up and scurried on over to talk to him.  Since the man was about 55 years old, somewhat husky, with a commanding presence and an authoritative tone, I figured he must be the non-resident psychiatrist who I’d heard mentioned many times.  It wasn’t till later that I found out who the man really was.

John Stoats stood in front of the man, and since I loved to listen to John try to have a conversation, I stood there listening, but this man’s appearance must have put John into a lucid state, because he was very clearly complaining to the man about a general lack of shirts in his life, and then relating this—as he did everything—with his goal in life, which was to get a driver’s license.  The big man pouted sternly with the seriousness of it all, and pulled two chairs away from the dining room table into the middle of the room where he plunked them down back-to-back.  He ushered John into one chair, and sat down in the other one himself, and the two of them sat backwards on their chairs, knee-to-knee, arms on each others’ shoulders, and this man lectured in his booming voice for a good five minutes along the lines of, You want shirts? How many shirts do you want?  I can get you more shirts than you ever knew existed . . . and on and on.

Soon it was dinner time, so we all sat down around the big round wooden table which was made from a huge cable spool laid on its side, and cut in two in the shape of a Yin-Yang symbol, then stained and varnished.  At the Freedom House, one household member, either a placement or a family member, had dinner duty each night, so we always had a big family dinner, and it was customary for everyone to hold hands and chant OM before digging in.  I had gotten stuck sitting next to the old guy, and his huge right hand crushed my left hand as he sang OM so deeply and loudly that my eyes popped  open in time to see a couple of the younger placements, shaking at the shoulders in stifled giggles.  I couldn’t wait to get dinner over with and get out of there, ever-fearful that the man with the big ego would try to have a conversation with me, but I learned as the meal progressed that he didn’t need anybody’s help having a conversation.  I learned later that his name was Donovan, also known as Don West, and he was at Rivendell because he had lung cancer and had chosen Rivendell as the place to be till the end.

I first noticed Rico as I walked across the sandy parking lot at the Freedom House, past where a group of teenage boys and a 39-year old man with curly red hair and a handlebar mustache were sweating over a radiator removal.  The tall, thin, red-haired man swore viciously, and one of the kids said, Mellow out, Rico, Jesus fucking Christ.

It turned out that Rico was actually a very quiet mechanical engineer who lived at Rivendell because he was trying to sober up.  He was from a farm in North Dakota, and Judas liked to hang out with him because they were both drawn to big, physically intimidating projects like getting that cable spool home and making a table out of it.  Although Rico was a very quiet person, he loved to drive fast down winding mountain roads, his tires squealing around blind curves on the wrong side of the road.

Jimmy Twotone, Irish from the City, and bumbling big brother of the ever-sharp Ann-Marie, was an occasional companion for Judas and I, because he hated getting serious and always wanted to smoke pot and hang out.  To us, that spelled “reliable.”  He was a tall guy, straight hair cut off at the shoulders, loud and shy at the same time, aggressive and self-effacing simultaneously.  He reminded us of Batanwa Jim.  It was Jimmy who renamed me.  Since his mouth tended to move faster than his prodigious-yet-under-used-yet-somehow-overtaxed brain, he momentarily couldn’t remember my name—at the time I was being called Gunther—and in order to continue his sentence without stopping to remember my name, he filled in the blank with “Luther.”

I knew what to say for once: “Luther Limbolust.”  Limbolust was the name of a poem I wrote when I was 14, about some ancient entities up in the sky who manipulate the basic fabric of reality, then later I used limbolust to signify the mood hallucinations caused by marijuana intoxication—re-experienced unconnected moods from some other context than the current one, usually lasting only a few seconds.  Luther Limbolust became my name; there are whole towns in California where at least half the people in the town that know me, have never heard me called Maxwell.  I have since used the names Luther Limberlust, Luther Rangeley, and Luther Limberluck.  I am presently thinking of having my given name, Irving, amputated completely so I can start over with the name that people actually call me.

It was out in the sandy parking lot during a pickup-loading task that I heard that too-familiar Voice: the Moving Voice informed me that I would be moving on soon.  I had to become genuinely insane, so I wouldn’t have to load trucks, or work in the garden, or whatever nonsense I was being asked to go along with.  I waited for my next paycheck from my job, cashed it and split for Haight Ashbury.  A nice young man—actually the first person I asked—just happened to know where I could get a hundred-lot of blotter acid for $135, so I gave him most of my last paycheck and prepared for the worst as he disappeared around the corner.  Amazingly, he was back in less than five minutes with a little sheet of paper filled with 100 squares, in each of which was printed a green dragon.  The decorated blotter paper had been used to soak up liquid LSD, then cut up into little squares to be sold as singles after drying.  The nice young chap told me that I’d gotten lucky, that this was the best acid he’d ever tried, and that the chemist was a genius.  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s interpretation of the ensuing events, he was not exaggerating.  The acid turned out to be of a very special variety which can be consumed daily without any dampening effect due to buildup of the chemical in the bloodstream.  Most acid can only be consumed effectively every other day, maximum.  This stuff never stopped working, no matter how much I already had taken.  But I didn’t know that yet.

Hoping that I hadn’t been ripped off, I headed for the freeway, and Kansas, where having any quantity of drugs had often gotten me free rent without having to go before a committee.  I got a ride to the country where I waited for a long time, and it was getting dark and I was alone with no one around, so I figured, what the heck, no one’s gonna pick me up, so I took my first trial hit of the 100-dose sheet, and a little pickup with a camper shell immediately pulled over to give me a ride.

The two guys in the cab said I’d have to get in the camper shell, and the camper shell was full of stuff which was then covered with a mattress, so I had to lay on top of the mattress that was on top of this pile of stuff near the ceiling of the camper shell, but it had a skylight in it, so I didn’t mind; all I could see anywhere in my field of vision was stars.  I started coming on to the acid right away, as it became completely dark, and I said something aloud to myself that struck me as interesting, funny, and ingenious in some unique way, and it went from there: for the next hour I hollered and sang and made up jokes and stories and poems and spewed like a fountain of words, ecstatically yelling and laughing and hoping this would never stop, when I noticed that the truck was pulling over to the shoulder of the freeway.

I looked down into the cab through the back cab window, and one of the guys was getting out a big knife.  Oh shit, I’m a prisoner in here and I’m gonna be killed and eaten right here at the side of the freeway.  But the passenger got out and brought me over this little mirror thing and showed me how to snort cocaine through a rolled up dollar bill, then we got back in our respective places and the pickup took off again.

Now besides the incredible sensations I was experiencing, including having nothing in my field of vision but stars, accompanied by the clear sensation of moving at 60 mph, I also couldn’t feel the inside of my face, because of the cocaine, but I couldn’t quite stop having a good time nevertheless.  Although I don’t remember one word of what spewed out of me that night, I knew at the time that I was having an experience that I needed to be having.  Having a peak experience involving verbal spontaneity was nothing to sneeze at, for me.  I was in awe of this acid; the crappy little microdots I’d gotten from that idiot in that apartment building were like rancid kool-aid compared to this Green Dragon.

When those guys dropped me off, they wanted to know what I was on, because they wanted some of it.  I tore them off a couple of dragon squares and they were on their way.  I made my way across the western states until I finally arrived in South Dakota, where a guy let me off at his house out on a country highway.  I took off with my backpack and as I was walking down the two-lane highway, still tripping or tripping again, I found a big inflatable ball by the road and walked down the highway bouncing the ball, perfectly content to be in the experience I was having.  That kind of thing doesn’t happen to me every day.  I hoped that by staying in the zone of perfect contentment as long as possible, I would increase the chances of the acid at least rearranging some of my inner connections, or at least just unplug enough of them to make me a helpless, ecstatic blob.

I finally arrived at Joybroth’s house, the Human Hotel, and had the time of my life for days and days, in a 24-hour unending fog of delight beyond hope, the Celebration of Pain.  I had no worries, no interests, just love of existence complete with its most heartbreaking attributes, and gratitude for the privilege of having this Planet to walk around on, breathing in the air that was so conveniently there whenever I wanted it.  One night I got home and the house was dark; Joybroth wasn’t home so I had to crawl in the window.  Then I bent forward in the dark and smacked my forehead right on the high back of a wooden chair.  I was tripping so hard when that happened that I went into a very special state, which I called Waiting for the Meatwagon to Come Get Me.  Another afternoon I was wandering around town wearing thongs, and I absently stepped up onto the sidewalk but missed by so far that my toenail on my big toe snagged on the front face of the curb and got bent straight up in the middle.  The pain was exquisite.  The weird thing about this acid was that it made everything more interesting, even pain.  Rather than being freaked out about the pain, I was enthralled by it.  This acid made everything better.

It all started coming together pretty soon; how could it not?  I had everything I’d ever wanted: more LSD than I had the ability to consume.  And that wasn’t all.  Joybroth had this friend—anyway, this stuff Joybroth could get was supposed to be THC, the famous active ingredient in marijuana, though it very well could have been something entirely different, probably the stuff they call ecstasy, or MMDA.  All I know is that a little tiny bit of this drab-colored goo wrapped up in plastic made the world a completely different sort of place for about 24 hours.  No hallucinations, etc.  This was not a place of lights.  And yet through the darkness of this state of mind, I found a solution: the key to all solutions:  I must have a child!  A love child!  I must impregnate the most convenient female and create my love child immediately!

I didn’t question this conviction; I didn’t have to.  I know conviction when I see it.  I was more than just convinced that I had discovered the secret hiding place of Infinite Love.  The other night I’d stayed up all night listening to The Nutcracker Suite continuously, over and over, tripping on Green Dragon, and having an outright religious experience, something about being in love with guilt or something.  But that was nothing compared to the profundity of what I was experiencing now under the influence of the little glob of green goo that Joybroth had lovingly provided at his expense.  Make a baby!  Of course!  How could I have not known what my own soul was crying out for?

Joybroth and Ocepi (O.C.P. = Overdeveloped Conscience Projectiles) Germley had forgiven me for the other night when I had kept them awake playing the same record all night, so they didn’t mind literally holding my hand all through this night while I tried like hell to describe to them the intensity of the love wave that was passing through my body with a physical force like a moving wall of molten lead.  If Joybroth and Ocepi hadn’t been there to hold my hand all night, it would have been kind of weird.  As it was, it was kind of weird for them.  They helped me go through a list of every female I knew, and it turned out that after careful consideration, the only female I knew who could even conceivably say yes to even part of what I wanted to do would have to be Justerina Beena.  So I hitchhiked to Kansas City at dawn, totally devoted to my new mission in life with every fiber of my being.  This had nothing to do with sex.  It came from my deep, primeval brain parts, the lizard part of the brain, from whence our more profound instinctual impulses arise.  I got to downtown KC and stopped in Walgreens to get a big cup of coffee.  I’d been up all night.  Now it was time to go propose something.  I walked outside.

By the time I’d figured out which way to go and gotten about halfway there, I had come down from the WIW (Whatever It Was) and I was ready to bum a cigarette from Justerina Beena and see if she’d let me take a nap.  As it turned out, she had a boyfriend, and I was relieved that no part of me need feel guilty for not going through with my fiendish plot to impregnate her.  I went right back to Hazing.

Joybroth had kept my Green Dragon safe for me in my absence.  I took up where I’d left off.  Now that I knew how much this oddball green goo stuff could change the world, I figured that a fat dose of it combined with a good solid three or fours hits of acid would put me right where I wanted to be for good.  One morning that became the scheduled event.  I took so much of the goo that Joybroth had to try to lick his dose off the saran wrap it had been packaged in, then he ended up just swallowing the plastic, and then spent the next few hours trying to barf it back up.  I’d been noticing a tendency lately to not quite know if I was going to come down or get higher; it no longer seemed to have anything to do with what I was taking.  I might come down a little and then start getting higher for no reason, without taking anything.  I considered this a very encouraging sign that I was losing control of my reality’s normal hitching post.  Once I got past the peaking of the acid I had to lay down because I could feel the combination of the two states of mind generating a momentum of its own, and as I suspected they might, the two psychedelics created a third more powerful than either.

It took all of my willpower to prevent the leprechauns from climbing out of the walls.  I was very near panic and found it hard to move.  It was beyond throwing up to make it better.  Leprechauns were supposed to be nice.  I couldn’t even see them, but I knew they would come out if I lost control even a little bit.  I was not ready for leprechauns; I had misjudged my level of interest in leaving my normal reality behind forever.  I knew then what I had to do.  I was sorry I had to do it, but it was one of those things.  I crawled over to where my stuff was, and managed to shove it into my duffel bag.  I crawled into the bathroom, where Joybroth was sniffing the mushrooms growing in the old shag carpet on the floor, and convinced him that he was going to stand up and walk to his car, and then drive me to the St. Job’s Hospital.  He did this, although he doesn’t remember doing it.  I don’t know if he remembers making me burn the remaining two-thirds of my hundred-lot of Green Dragon.  What a horrible waste.

I couldn’t stand up properly.  I had a 40-lb. duffel bag hanging from one shoulder, but I couldn’t even stand up straight without it.  I was bent over at the waist and it was all I could do to walk.  I was enjoying this immensely.  I hobbled around the ground floor of the hospital, because I was embarrassed to turn myself in at the Emergency Room as a drug overdose.  I spotted a nurse who I knew from when I had been on the drug and alcohol unit upstairs, and she took me over and introduced me to the nice people in the Emergency Room who took me over and showed me where I could wait for a long, long time.  There was a young couple in there waiting too, and they had a baby with them.  I lectured to them about the evils of drugs and made them promise me that they would teach their baby to not use them.  I was proud of the way my hand shook and the water splashed out of my paper cup.  I was not so excited about the way I could not close my eyes without forgetting pretty much everything there is to know: where I was, who I was, etc.  I could see all the way over the reality fence with my eyes closed, so I struggled to keep them open, and fought off the panic of being so close to complete splintering of the miserable reality that I despised.

 Finally “my” doctor showed up, the one who had been on my case when I’d been upstairs at the drug unit.  He was very disappointed that I had done something stupid to get him called in to work, and he didn’t mind saying so.  I just kept pleading with him to stop the chit-chat and make the bad thing stop happening in my mind, because reality was dissolving on me and I was afraid I’d be in hell for the rest of my life if he didn’t do something before I cracked.  He lectured me a little longer and finally gave me a shot of Valium and that’s all I knew till I woke up a day or two later in heaven.

Heaven was a place where a gorgeous young nurse helped me take my clothes off and wheeled me into the shower on a wheelchair, and I was in the perfect state of blissful spontaneity, a state of no worry and no guilt, so I said to the girl, “Why don’t we just fall in love and get married?”  and she smiled but her absence through the duration of the shower sequence was glaring.  For some reason I attract women when I’m in the hospital sort of by default or something.  Bev started appearing in my room; she was working at the hospital as an intern in hospital administration.  She had been a cheerleader in high school, and according to Prunesquallor she loved to generate sexual tension in a playful, but unproductive way.  I took this opportunity—since she asked me why I remembered her so well from high school—to inform her that my chief preoccupation in Latin class had been to stare at her legs.  Only under the influence of whatever I took and whatever they “brought me down” with would I have been a happy enough person to look a pretty stranger in the eye and tell her I like to look at her.  So she started asking me things like, What word do you prefer to use in reference to the act of sex?  Fuck?  Screw?  Copulate?  Have sex?  Make love?  I don’t remember what else we talked about, except that she made me promise that I wouldn’t take drugs anymore, and gave me her phone number.

But before that, there was the waking up in heaven.  I was amazed to discover, upon waking up in the hospital bed, that everything was perfect.  They wouldn’t tell me what I was on, wisely enough, so I had to be content to be in Nirvana without knowing why.  I discovered that my empty shell wasn’t so empty; I found out I had strong, overwhelmingly mournful feelings about the loss of my youth to self-destructive binges, one right after the other, that made me an unattached leaf blown in the wind with no place to go home to and no one expecting me.  I cried hysterically to whoever happened to be sitting by my bed, whether the social worker or my Mama or whoever, and the next minute I would be laughing, screeching and howling as hysterically and totally as I had been sobbing just before.  I didn’t care who heard me and it felt so absolutely awesomely fabulously good to holler out loud and not give a shit what anybody thought of me, because somehow I’d been stripped of any shred of give-a-shit for my own neurotic dream; existence had become nothing less that a great big screaming celebration of the release of emotion, the expression of an inner person not intimidated or frightened of other humans, a person who could cry and laugh in the same paragraph and experience total lack of embarrassment; not only that, but more importantly, the emotions moving through my body and out my mouth were 100% real; I knew they were mine because I could feel them.  I could feel them moving in me, and oozing out my pores.  I was absolutely in love with existing, with every fiber of my misery and frustration.

One time a nurse came in the room while I was yelling Life is bad!  I hate living!  I am having a terrible life!  I hate my life! and I was feeling it completely, and this nurse walks in and tells me to be quiet because there are seriously ill people trying to sleep, and they are in a lot of pain, and I just yelled at her and told her to fuck off, because in heaven I had no interest in the complaints and opinions of other people.  The whole performance was totally spontaneous, and therein lay the beauty of the experience, the reason I cherish it above many other memories: spontaneity is a delicacy I have only dreamt of indulging in this life.  But this stuff was pouring out of me because my normal conscious mind—the “Bookkeeper,” also known as the personality I patched together after my real one withered at the age of 22 months—was entirely absent, still cowering somewhere from the onslaught of psychoactive drugs I had recently tried to kill it with.  In the absence of the usual controller of what I was and was not allowed to say, do, feel, or experience, I spent a few days in heaven knowing what it was like to not be afraid to be me, exactly the way I was.

It was not long before I was back to normal except for a few shadowy patterns of orange light superimposed on my visual field, and I was seated before the Great Doctor Brainbowl, happier than a pig in shit because I was back where I had always wanted to be, and I had a piece of paper my sister Mo had typed up for me requesting that the Great One allow me to perform a systematic program of Primal Therapy on myself, because I knew for a fact that nothing else would work to make me cure me.  And do you know what she said to me?  She rared back on her fat old haunches and speared me to the wall with her eyeballs, and she said, “We don’t take no trash on this ward.  You are here to get better, and you will work with us in our program the way we do things here or you will be gone.  Do you understand?”  Well that was as good as anything because now she was playing into my Shrink Is Bad Game which was really more fun than my Primal Therapy Game anyway, so I agreed wholeheartedly that she was playing her role perfectly and skipped onto the ward to see how many of my old friends and patients were still there.

Robin Roost was.  He had come in while I was there the first time, a returnee: all the chronics knew him from his previous stays there.  He was a skinny kid in a workshirt that made me identify him as being from the farm.  He was extremely shy, like a cat that had been declawed and dis-spirited.  His dark hair was cut off close to his head, and his black-framed glasses accentuated his skittish, bulging eyes and his pointed nose, chin and ears.  He was nothing short of a pixie.  He didn’t say much, but obviously had a rich inner existence of some kind; he would sometimes talk in his soft, breathy little voice, to people who weren’t there; he could often be seen running off to hide because he had gotten a sudden need to giggle and didn’t want to be seen doing it.  From time to time he would just up and sprint from one end of the men’s wing to the other and back, and then sit in a chair and stare out the window, calm as could be.  We had a patient locked up in the seclusion room who kept banging to get let out, because bathroom breaks were given only two or three times a day to secluded patients, and Robin couldn’t stand the pounding.  He shook his pointy little knuckles at the seclusion room.  “Stop it!” he cried out, barely above a whisper.

I told on Robin Roost once, and I told on someone else for him another time.  You used to see him standing in the hall over the drinking fountain for the longest time with a Styrofoam cup in his hand, fighting a giggling fit the whole time, getting all smooth and silent for a few seconds as you passed him in the hall, and then back to his giggle/stifle ritual as soon as you were a few feet past him.  I finally discovered the core of what was going on, at least in terms of my reality, though not in terms of his: he was first peeing in the cup in the men’s room stall, and drinking his urine.  The rest of the ritual was what we could see in the hall.  I felt that whatever I could do for Robin by keeping his secret was nothing compared to what I would have to go through for not telling anybody, so I told.  I hope I didn’t screw up his fun too much.

Another time I noticed the door to Robin Roost’s room was closed in the middle of the day and there were loud voices coming from inside.  This was very odd, so I went in.  Robin was laying on his back in his bed with his sheet covering him, and this young kid who’d just been shipped in from the reform school was standing there with his belt in his hand, and he was livid.  He told me that he was going to beat the shit out of Robin Roost for masturbating.  I said, Are you crazy?  He’s in his bed under his blanket with the door shut, and you are a scum-sucking maggot to be in his room at all, and you should go back to jail for having your belt in your hand, much less threatening to hit a helpless nutcase with it.

Well, I didn’t really say that, but I did see that this kid needed to have his belt taken away and used on him, and I didn’t do that either; I knew I had to live with the little prick as surely as Robin Roost did, so I just left and went over to the aides’ station and told Mrs. Mize what was going on, and that little old white lady waddled over to Robin’s room as fast as she could go, with a couple other aides and a nurse coming right along behind, and they all started hollering at that mean kid, and he came out of Robin Roost’s room and was no longer allowed to wear belts.

Later on that day, Robin Roost came up behind me, leaned as close to me as he dared, and whispered, “Thank you.”  I smiled at him and he hurried away.

My roommate this time around was a husky old Indian man, completely silent and stoic.  He somehow managed to attract no attention whatsoever.  I believe that he was being drugged to death with his own cooperation.  Twice I saved him from choking in his sleep on his own vomit, by calling the aides to get him out of his bed before he suffocated.  I felt funny about saving his life, because I thought he wanted to die, but I remembered Rolf McKinney, and thought maybe if this guy ever gets out of here, he’ll be off these doctor drugs and he can kill himself properly with alcohol, or whatever.  I just couldn’t lay there all relaxed and cozy and listen to someone choking to death on his own vomit just because he was too stupefied from doctor drugs to stand up and run to the bathroom like most of us would do if we got sick during the night—even if we were in a suicidal depression.

It was with renewed vigor this time around that I felt it necessary to demand my rights; this time I even knew what my rights were.  I had studied the Madness Network News, read books, and even visited the MNN office in San Francisco to thank them for what they were doing, and this was a golden opportunity to work from the inside to fight this system of hiding our problem children and problem parents in prisons masquerading as  hospitals, where people are tortured for being different, tortured into submission with overdoses of drugs for the convenience of the doctor and his staff, tied down and secluded and never helped with the problem that brought them to the institution in the first place.  My Angry Prophet act was in fine tune, and I exercised it regularly.

One day I felt like going for a walk; shopping in fact.  It was just one of those days when a guy wakes up knowing that this is his day to take a stroll downtown.  I knew where to go from watching habitual and one-time escapees go AWOL many times in the past—they always went straight to the nearest freeway on-ramp, and they always got caught and brought right back—and I had a wealth of data stored up from multiple viewings of Cuckoo’s Nest  from which to extract useful information on what it was supposed to feel like to escape from the nuthouse and go on a pleasure outing.  There was one hour a day when the outside door was kept unlocked, and it only seemed logical that I was being invited to exercise my constitutional rights and exit the building under my own supervision.

I was there on a temporary commitment, a two-week evaluation.  Six weeks into my stay, after being told over and over that there were good official and understandable reasons why I had not been either officially diagnosed as needing to stay for a specific reason, or released, as I understood my legal rights, I went downtown.  I bought a notebook and a pen, and went straight back to the hospital.  I knocked on the door, which was locked now, and Nurse Grabass opened it up.  Where have you been? she wanted do know.

Shopping.

The best shopping trip I ever had.

Although not much was said about this, I knew I had gotten a great big old black mark in the Great big old Doctor Rainbow’s great big old black book.  If this didn’t qualify for giving that old prescription technician a quiver in her liver, then what would I have to do next?

I got even more focused on my legal rights as a mental patient.  I wrote them down and gave them to the staff, in case they had any interest, and they just heckled me.  Whats-his-name, the only male aide, was not supposed to play Ping-Pong with me any more.  Too bad, because playing Ping-Pong was the highlight of his day as much as it was mine.  One day I asked to make a phone call to my lawyer; not that I had one, but I had a legal right to make a phone call to my lawyer, so I decided to test the staff to see if they were allowed to give me my legal rights.  They were not.  I told them I was going to call my lawyer anyway, because it was my legal right to, and they just heckled me.  I tried walking into the aides’ station to use the phone, and they nearly broke my eardrums.  I could tell that Mrs. Clara Friend was getting emotional.  She liked me, but she was boss aide and she had to be meaner to me that the others, because she had a better job to lose if she wasn’t.

I went around the corner from the aides’ station, down at the end of a short corridor that ended in a locked door that led to an unlocked lobby; this locked door was my stakeout for some 45 minutes till the right person opened it to enter the ward: a psychologist who hadn’t been around long and didn’t know me from the man in the moon.  He opened the door and came in, and I held the door open for him.  I nodded and said thanks as he passed, so he held the door open for me in turn.  I walked out, smiling and nodding in a businesslike way, just like he did.  The door shut behind me and I split around the side of the building.  This was exciting!  I recommend it to anybody!  This is not an experience I would trade in for anything.

But then here came Psychology Man to save the day.  He ran around the corner of the building, fear written on his face: Oh no!  I gave someone his constitutional rights!  I’ll be fired for sure!  He put his arm around me and sweet-talked me into coming back with him.  The staff heckled me on the way in, and I read them my rights once again, but they were unimpressed.

I was in my room fuming and trying to figure out how I could beat my own act next time, when I heard my name being called: IRVING!

That was my first name: Irving, which was also my Daddy’s name, although everyone called him Irv.  Mrs. Clara Friend always called me Irving because she knew it was my first name and thought it was proper that I be called by my first name.  I knew it was just an excuse for her to give me a personal nickname, and by now I was trying to get everybody to call me Luther Limbolust, so I pretended I didn’t hear.  I heard Mrs. Clara Friend calling my name again: IRVING! real loud this time.

I got up off my bed and wandered in the direction of the aides’ station, hoping they were getting ready to have the guards try and put me in seclusion or something, because I would gladly rip their faces off with my bare hands if they tried anything like that, and then I’d get transferred to jail where I would at least have a release date to look forward to.

Mrs. Clara Friend was standing out front of the aides’ station with those big sad eyes and that look set into her mouth like, you have gone and did it this time, you big smartass, and she said, “Doctor Brainbowl says get your stuff and get outta here right this very minute.  You have been kicked out.”

That was good-bye for now.

My brother Dirk had told me, in response to my request, that I could stay with him in his apartment in Lawrence, Kansas, if I ever got out of the nuthouse, so I headed that way.  It was only 20 miles, and I got picked up by a young woman who owned a carpet cleaning business in Lawrence.  She tried to hire me to go to work for her right on the spot.  I would have nothing to do with that; since I had learned how to get food stamps I was pretty much ready to try retiring for real this time, and by Golly, that was my firm resolve and no do-good boss-type lady was going to cause me to stray from my path.

My brother Dirk said I could use the living room for my bedroom and he pretty much went into his bedroom and shut the door and I didn’t see him too much.  Except for the first couple of days when he was happy to see groceries coming in, thanks to the food stamp program, he acted like we were back in my Mama and Daddy’s house and he had to go in his room to get any privacy.  I tried to not think about what made him feel that way.

I spent most of my time during the day working on my new words: frawmbickle (from “frolic” plus “climb”) was one of the words I made up that day, along with joovigle, vroombellerate, troovammickle, frumbessle, and more.  I didn’t know what they meant at the time but I knew they were important.  I tried to explain to Dirk the importance of my new universal language, which was hard because I hadn’t figured out what it was yet, and he seemed slightly interested, which surprised me and made me wonder if he might be humoring me.  These words all became permanently part of my vocabulary and developed meanings of their own.

At night I used to go hang out with Goat Doubl Germley and Maria his roommate.  I had known Maria in high school and Goat was from Wichita; they were all an extension of the coffee and cigarette circle I had always identified with Shade Further.  Goat was a poet and worshipped the music of Patti Smith.  He always had pot so I was always at his apartment.  I spontaneously wrote poems to show him I could do it, and he was flabbergasted.  From then on he acted like I could do no wrong, and I thought that was cool, and besides that, he always had pot.  It still bothered me that I’d come home from Goat and Maria’s house and instead of finding Dirk in his own living room relaxing, he’d be in his bedroom with the door shut.  But one night I came home and he was sitting in the living room in the dark, in a big soft chair that rocked and swiveled.  These were furnished apartments, and the furniture all smelled bad from generations of sweaty students sitting in them.  In Kansas it is too hot to sleep all summer because of the humidity, even if it’s only 85º.

Dirk started telling me all about the work he was doing in his drama school at the University of California.  I was beside myself.  He talked nonstop for 45 minutes.  Then he went to bed.  He never did that again.  I don’t know what possessed him to do it.  I just tried to stay calm, in case he was planning to shoot me when he was done talking.

After about a month or less I figured I better prove I’m totally free to go where I want when I want, since I really was serious this time about being retired, so I called Justerina Beena and told her I was coming.  I moved in with Justerina Beena, until her boyfriend whined about it, so I moved in with him, and that solved that problem, until they broke up, and one day I was over at Justerina Beena’s house and she got a phone call from a friend who was calling to let us know that her ex-boyfriend had put my stuff out in the hall, so I moved back in with her, till she got pissed off because all I wanted to do was sit around and read her Madness Network News,  and she was jealous because she had to go to work and I’d be sitting around smoking her cigarettes all day and acting like I was some sort of angry prophet who was going to go save all the crazy people from the bad doctors, meanwhile she had to buy the food and tell me what to cook, so what kind of roommate is that?  And besides, she just needed to be alone for awhile.

In response to Justerina Beena’s pressure to take care of my own needs, I felt only contempt.  As Saint Theresa, the mad gypsy, she had been annoying and unsettling; now she was getting boring, putting on a little weight, and her mouth was a thin, straight, expressionless slit that reminded me of my Mama’s when she was depressed. I would catch up with her later.  I had real life to go out there and fight with.  I decided to go to Wichita and see Batanwa Jim, and give him a hard time for avoiding me.  I suddenly felt that I needed to see him urgently, and give him a good tongue-lashing.  And then I’d go back to Hazing and work, because I’d heard that my Mama’s friend Bobbie Wilson had gotten another piano for me to refinish for her, and there would be another couple hundred dollars I could get for a couple thousand dollars worth of work, so I figured, what the heck, a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money, I could get something good with that, so I headed for Lawrence to pick up some stuff I’d left at my brother Dirk’s house, then I would be on my way to Hazing to look at that piano job before going to Wichita to seek out Batanwa Jim.

When I got to Dirk’s apartment he was ready for me.  He asked me what my plans were, how long I planned to stay, etc.  I improvisingly shortened my intended stay by several days and said I’d be leaving in the morning.

The next day, Dirk stayed home from class and lay in his room reading with his door open, obviously waiting for me to leave.  When I went in to say good-bye, he handed me a sealed envelope and told me not to open it till I was gone.

So there I was walking up and down the hills of Lawrence; it was 98º and 99% humidity.  I had an overweight duffel bag dangling from one shoulder and my guitar in my other hand, and sweat was dripping into my eyes so I had to stop anyway to wipe my face, and figured, what the heck, this is a good time to get an earful.  So I opened up the letter, and sure enough, I was no longer welcome to stay with my brother Dirk, and although he did thank me for buying some food, he seemed to think that my presence made him uncomfortable, and he couldn’t relax around me or occupy his space in his normal way.  I picked up my stuff and started walking, and I wrote a poem in my head for my brother Dirk while I walked toward the freeway:

 

 Dear Dirk:

Sometimes my tears mingle with the sweat running down my brow to form a vile bloody solution to the whole mess.

Your Favorite Mistake

 

I proceeded on to Hazing, Kansas, where I eventually found myself at my Mama’s house.  She wasn’t home so I put my stuff in her back yard and headed on over to Bobbie Wilson’s house to see the piano she had bought for me to fix up.

It just so happened that Mowlfangough Z. Germley lived with his parents across the street and down just a little ways from my Mama’s house, and as I was walking in the general direction of Bobbie Wilson’s neighborhood, Mowlfangough saw me from his garage and snapped to attention.  A smile hovered on his face, but only for a second.  He hesitantly began to walk in my direction.  I saw his Mama in the back yard, I saw her see me, I saw her do the same stumbling act.

Mowlfangough called out halfway across the street before he got to me: “You heard about Batanwa Jim didn’t you?”

I knew my friend was dead.

So this guy gets shot in the stomach in his apartment in Wichita, and it takes him three days to die, and nobody finds him for three more days, and it goes into the Hazing Journal as “possible suicide” or some shit just like that, just because the Wichita authorities took one look at the arrest record of James Thomas Patrick Kiernan, found out his dad had disowned him for not joining the Army, and figured, what the heck, let’s just say this clown did himself in, and save ourselves a whole bundle of trouble.

His Mama tells a different story.  She says he had made enemies with someone he’d bought a panel truck from.  The panel truck he’d always wanted more than anything.  The panel truck that would make his life worth living again.  The panel truck that became a serious confrontation in his life for some reason, and in his Mama’s opinion, it was a grudge match over the panel truck he’d bought that got him killed, by the guy he had bought it from.  My version of the story is that Batanwa Jim made a decision one day that his life was over, and he stalked his death for the next few short years until he found it.  It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger.  It does matter that the police and the newspaper are pernicious assholes for making a statistic out of an honest man who had a good loving heart, but there is nothing for me to do about it.

Batanwa Jim was in ROTC when he died.

The first thing he did when he got someone to find his body was to come find me in Lawrence or Kansas City or wherever I was, and tell me good-bye in a dream.  Then he headed for one of the many places where the souls of people can go when their bodies die; but on his way to these vast realms, one of his nondimensional eyeballs pulled off and took a detour, and wound up investigating a huge junkyard full of little tiny buildings of all kinds, piles of them, mountains of them.  Outhouses, guardhouses, tool sheds, pump houses, doghouses, student rentals—anything and everything that one might find in the category of “little shack” was represented here in this Heaven of Huts.

As he wandered around in awe of the vast junkyard, under a starless purple sky, a representation of himself formed, stark naked, and this conscious figment soon noticed that from time to time he would pass a shack that was not yet on one of the piles; he even saw one materialize out of thin air once, so he assumed that this is where shacks come when they die, and the huge, seemingly junked crane he could see in the distance must be used to put the shacks in the piles whenever someone gets around to firing up the crane.

Then he noticed that as he passed the shacks that were not in the piles, each one put out a sort of buzzing or murmuring sound.  He put his ear up against the outside of an old lawnmower shed, and the more he concentrated, the more he thought he could hear ghostly voices.  He went to the door to study a plaque hanging on it; the letters seemed familiar but he couldn’t read the words or even tell how they were spelled.  Plaque after plaque on shack after shack said a lot of something that my friend didn’t understand.  But dogged chap that he is, he kept trying, until finally he got to a plaque on the door of a little miner’s shack that he could understand.  This is what it said:

 

“JAMES:” (that’s what my Mama used to call him)

You are in the right place.  For once.  Ha ha ha, that’s a joke, my friend.  Here is your assignment.  You can turn it down if you want.  You can keep on walking.  The trick is that you have to say yes or no to the assignment before you know exactly what it is, and all you can know beforehand is that it has to do with helping your friend Luther Limbolust attempt—yet fail—to save the world with the next few dozen years of his life.  Will you do anything you have to in order to fulfill this temporary assignment before you move on to your next adventure, or will you move on now?

 

My friend made a face and wrinkled his brow at the sign on the door.  What the fuck! he said out loud.  Then he said to the plaque, in a loud voice as if it were hard of hearing, I just wasted a whole life as an enthusiastic, energetic Irish stud who wound up sacrificing everything to take his clues from this sadly deluded Limbolust character, and you’re asking me if I want to contribute the first few decades of my time in paradise working for this asshole who got me busted and ruined my life?  And I can’t even know what the assignment is without saying yes?

The plaque didn’t budge.  It just sat there.  My friend sat down on a pile of boards across from the miner’s shack, and stared at the tiny wooden house.  He made faces at it.  He tried to feel sorry for himself.  He didn’t know how long this mysterious assignment would take or what he would have to do, yet he had no inkling of what else he might want to do.  Finally he said, OK, I’ll help Luther.

What made him decide?  Job security.  Knowing that he would have something to do, like in the ROTC, and he could escape the confusion that normally dragged on him like weights tied to his ankles.  He could just forget about his problems for awhile and concentrate on something else, let part of an eon pass, put together a new game plan slowly; and he realized that whoever wrote the plaque and got him to come here and find it must know more about what he wanted to do than he did himself.  OK, he said, What’s behind Door Number One?

This time the words on the plaque changed in answer to his question:

 

Each of the small buildings in this area represents a person’s life on Earth.  The discarded shacks in the heaps are the stored memories of past lives, and the buzzing shacks down here on the ground, like this one, are the lives of people still living; these shacks appear when a person is born on the Earth.  If you look behind you, at the top of a stack you can barely see in the distance is a blue and pink portable wardrobe once owned by a famous pirate, which represents the life you just left.  This miner’s shack is the current life of the one who calls himself Luther Limbolust.  You have one more chance to slink away before your commitment to Luther’s next twenty or more years goes into effect.

 

My friend started banging on the door, and cried out in his phony Irish brogue, Let me in already!  I was just shot to death, and I have to sit down!

He heard someone scoot back a wooden chair on a wooden floor inside the building, and soft footsteps padded toward the door.  He heard a latch being slid to the side, and the doorknob turned.  The door opened inwardly, and a small man with silver hair parted in the middle, and little round wire-frame glasses, and liver spots, wearing overalls, was standing there silently, expressionless.

Are you the caretaker?  my friend asked.

The elderly man grabbed my friend’s nose between two of his knuckles and twisted, making a funny noise back in his throat.  He clucked and clicked and winked.

Are you OK?  my friend asked him.  Are you the baby-sitter?

I am the boy’s grandfather, said the old man.  Grandpa Zdaemon.  And you are that friend of his who shot himself after taking my grandson’s advice and selling the farm for evil potions.  Come in.  I’ve been expecting you.  I’ve been very lonely.

My friend followed the old man into the tiny little one room house.  There were some homemade wooden chairs and benches for furniture, an old sofa, and not much else.  The windows were all boarded over, except for one, which he hadn’t noticed before.  The makeshift chairs and benches were set up facing the big picture window, as if it were a movie screen.

Who sits in these chairs? my friend asked.

Nobody yet, said Grandpa Zdaemon.  I made one of them for you.

My friend noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned to face the big window.  Well lookee there, he cried, It’s Luther.

Yes, sure enough, my friends, he was looking in on me just as my Mama got home from her job and saw me sitting on her front porch.  She came over and hugged me and invited me in, and asked me how I was doing after all this time.

I have to sit down, I muttered, so I did.

I could feel her staring at me.  “It’s Kiernan,” I choked out.  “He’s dead.”

“Oh, Maxwell.”  She held my aching head while I convulsed and choked uncontrollably for some time, trying to not make any noise.

Up in the miner’s shack, my friend turned away from the screen, probably due to lack of interest, and asked Grandpa Zdaemon, Who’s that banging around in the basement?

That’s Emily, said Grandpa Zdaemon.  Emily Wrathburn.  I pushed her down the stairs and locked her in there, because she wasn’t helping.

A wailing sound drifted up from the cellar.

  

Now, speaking of Batanwa Jim, I just wanted to mention one time, before this overtly dreary chapter finally grinds itself into the dust, that it was at this point in my life that the general trend of everything psychological or motivational in my life changed from downhill fast to barely climbing.

Over the course of the accumulating years the improvement has been at least interesting if not remarkable.

Here is the first song I ever wrote on the piano:

 

Dirty Socks

(Ode to Batanwa Jim)

 

All that gone, and now you’ve

wasted yourself, down the tubes, down the tubes.

 

All those credit hours have

vanished in the fading light of the pagan moon.

 

Now I see it backwards it was

all a scheme to plot your doom.

 

Your only problem was

no room, no room.

 

Sleeping in the closet with your

dirty socks will never do.

 

You never lost it, but you

got so tired of finding it lingering in the gloom.